ABSTRACT
Even with the “animal question” dominating our twenty-first-century critical mindscapes, it can be argued that we have merely replaced the positive form of Enlightenment anthropocentrism—“I am the master of animals”—with a more self-consciously negative albeit feel-good form of neoliberal anthropocentrism: “I am guilty of mistreating/misrepresenting animals but by admitting this guilt I still am.” This chapter presents a case for jettisoning this latter logic by expanding the focus of postcolonial zoocriticism via discussions of animals unmarked by the signifier, that is, animals responsible for simultaneously disrupting and reconstituting the social.
